GL #1 - Small Projects & Steady Growth
After many months of shipping & marketing, I now have 3 revenue sources in addition to my job.
Hey there 👋
I was waiting to have some cool things to show before starting to share more updates here !
Since last update, it has been all about consistency for me. I didn’t go a week without shipping something new.
Right now, I have three projects that bring in some revenue every month, and in July & August, things started to get interesting.
1. Sponsorship.so (YouTube Sponsorship Intelligence Tool)
This little SaaS is picking up speed since the beginning of the year thanks to SEO and a more polished product after getting on calls with prospects and customers. While building it, I’ve learned a ton about Hotwire & performance tuning in Rails, and even made a video documenting my journey to build it.
It’s nice to finally see some growth with this SaaS, but it took some perseverance and a ton of work before it started to grow:
In 2025, I continued adding improvements, revamped the copywriting, designed clearer visuals, added use case pages, improved the performance by 10x and shipped tons of QoL improvements.
July & August were my best months yet for traffic and sign-ups, and I’ve got a long list of things to improve:
Adding social proof
Talking to users and churned customers to find pain points
More content (SEO + social)
More outreach (cold emails & LinkedIn)
Be present on Reddit
Building features like competitor alerts and media kits to improve retention
The good with this project
It now grows more steadily and brings in some revenue, finally!
It’s in a space where I have a network so I can ask lots of questions easily to know what to do next.
The bad with this project
It was very slow to start: For this tool to start generating revenue, it took months to collect the data & set up all the systems for it to be useful.
Performance issues from the beginning: I currently have a dozen paying users, and yet I needed to optimize some pages as much as we do at my day job at SchoolMaker, an app with hundreds of thousands of users because there’s so much data.
2. YT Careers (YouTube Job Board)
This one covers my Hetzner server bill and not much else right now, mostly because I’ve been focusing on the other projects.
Also, I’ve noticed that some more notable YouTube channels started to add job posts on it, so it might be worth improving it at some point, but for now I’ll focus on Sponsorship.so.
3. Rails Blocks (UI Components for Ruby on Rails)
This is the newest project: Rails Blocks, which is a library of Rails UI components with minimal dependencies.
To build it, I bundled and polished the UI components I had created in Sponsorship.so because I had a hunch that the Ruby on Rails community would appreciate it, and it seems to have resonated a lot!
I launched in early July and the results after 60 days surprised me: it made €4.3k!
I think it worked because:
I built a product that I would have bought 2 years ago in a heartbeat.
I’ve been sharing progress regularly on 𝕏 & Reddit, which let the newsletter grow and brought qualified traffic.
I collected emails early and reached out often.
For Rails Blocks, I’ll just continue to do more of what works and creating new components, but the #1 goal still remains to grow the MRR of Sponsorship.so as I think it has more potential in the long run.
Some lessons from I got from the beginning of 2025
Build for yourself. You’ll know the pain points better than anyone.
Show your work. Weekly updates build momentum and let your target market trust & know you.
Talk to people often. Not just paying customers, but leads and churned users too to understand what to improve.
This summer was a turning point, and I’m excited to see how the rest of the year plays out!
Sandu 👊